Building a Pretext to Wage War on Syria: As NATO Terror Front Collapses, US Drums Up Familiar WMD Lies

US Unveils Iraq WMD "Curveball-Style" Lies Vs. Syria

The last two weeks have seen a series of victories for the Syrian Army across Syria. It appears that 2 full companies of so-called “Free Syrian Army” fighters have been annihilated near Damascus, while government forces have restored order in parts of Homs and along the previously porous Lebanese-Syrian border.

Time has run out for the West, and it appears that they are desperately seeking any excuse to rescue their failing proxy war. When urgent, but otherwise unjustified military intervention is needed, a “humanitarian” pretext is usually invented – as it was in Libya.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Thursday that the United States has evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria.

This comes a couple of days after an Israeli intelligence official said Damascus was using weapons banned under international law against its own people in the country’s civil war. Syria has said rebels have used chemical weapons.

U.S. President Barack Obama has said the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons against its own people in the country would be a “game changer.”

Hagel said the intelligence agencies’ assessment was reached with “varying degrees of confidence,” meaning that they lacked proof or overwhelming evidence. He said the conclusion was “reached within the last 24 hours” and that the White House delivered a letter outlining the findings to Congress Thursday morning.

Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin. This assessment is based in part on physiological samples. Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For example, the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions. We do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime.

Physiological samples indicating sarin – in other words – samples taken from people exposed to sarin, could have been produced in a number of ways. It is confirmed that Libya’s chemical weapon stockpiles included sarin and mustard gas. In the Washington Post’s 2011 “Libya’s poison gas unaffected by turmoil, official says,” it was stated:

Experts believe that Libya destroyed about 3,300 bombshells designed to carry mustard and sarin gas chemicals years ago, as part of its deal to end decades of economic and diplomatic isolation with the West.

But some 10 metric tons of mustard sulfate and sarin gas precursor remain stockpiled in barrels at three locations in the Libyan desert south of Tripoli, where Moammar Gaddafi has holed up in a last-ditch fight to keep from being overthrown.

Many experts worry that the barrels are ripe for picking by terrorists linked to al-Qaeda.

It is just as likely that NATO’s proxy forces brought along with them not only small arms and cash from Libya, but also heavier weapons, including possibly chemical weapons – and specifically – sarin and mustard gas.

Image: (via the Guardian) “Chemical containers in the Libyan desert. There are concerns unguarded weapons could fall into the hands of Islamist militants. Photograph: David Sperry/AP” As increasing evidence reveals Libyan fighters and weapons are pouring into Syria, it seems the West is preparing to preempt or leverage the inevitability that Libya’s chemical arsenal has also found its way into the besieged nation.

….
Considering that the Syrian government knows the use of chemical weapons would basically hand the moral, strategic, and geopolitical initiative over to the West, and in light of its recent gains made using conventional weapons and tactics, it makes it all the more likely any real sarin to be found and used in Syria was the work of NATO proxies attempting to produce a plausible casus belli. Terrorists operating in Syria have already been caught using other chemical weapons.

And yet still, despite all of this doubt, the Western political establishment has hailed the so-called “findings” as the “game changer” required to green-light US military intervention.

Remember “Curveball”

It is absolutely imperative to recall the propaganda campaign conducted prior to invading Iraq in 2003. Chemical weapons were also used as a pretext for an otherwise unjustified war. The “intelligence” used by Hagel’s predecessors was admittedly fabricated on-demand.

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”

We can already envision the establishment defending in hindsight its next “noble lie” to unseat “the tyrant in Syria.”

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”

US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.

“How “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy,” indeed is the most important aspect of the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and is without doubt what is being done in Washington, Doha, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv in regards to Syria now.

The “Curveball-style” lies told about Iraq are now being repeated about Syria by an increasingly unhinged West who has tried every trick in the book, and is flipping back to the beginning to start over again. The question is, can the world afford to be led down this path again, knowing exactly where it ends? Nations and people outside the Wall Street-London international order are tasked with foiling this criminal war of aggression – unable this time to plead ignorance to the West’s true intentions.

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. The Centre of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post Global Research articles on community internet sites as long the source and copyright are acknowledged together with a hyperlink to the original Global Research article. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: [email protected]

www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the
copyright owner.